Making Tax Day Less Painful While Reducing Deficits
By Andrew L. Yarrow
April 11, 2008
Page 2 of 2
These four issues are areas where bipartisan agreement would be relatively easy. While the devil may be in the details, tax simplification is a no-brainer. We could eliminate most forms for most taxpayers; go to return-free filing, putting the onus on the government, as Grover Norquist has suggested; and/or adopt a Simplified Income Tax proposed by the Urban Institute's Leonard Burman, with a single family credit, a refundable work credit, a 15 percent mortgage credit, no state or local tax deduction, and a built-in 401(k).
To collect owed taxes, honesty could be encouraged and we could beef up enforcement, as the audit rate falling from 2.15 percent in 1978 to 0.58 percent in 2001. The employer health-care exclusion and many agricultural and corporate subsidies are often seen as prime candidates for elimination.
Reducing long-term debt requires many other reforms--notably of entitlement spending--but we could address much easier, tax-system reforms that could win broad support across the political spectrum.
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Andrew L. Yarrow, Washington director and vice president of Public Agenda, a nonpartisan think tank, is a professor of U.S. history at American University, and the author of Forgive Us Our Debts, a book about the causes, consequences, and cures for America's national debt, published by Yale University Press this spring. Yarrow's book Forgive us Our Debts is available from Yale University press http://yalepress.yale.edu/yupbooks/book.asp?isbn=9780300123531
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Note -- The opinions expressed in this column are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions, views, and/or philosophy of GOPUSA. >> Back -- Page 1 2
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